A purchase request lands in your inbox on Monday morning. By Wednesday, it is buried under dozens of other emails. Friday rolls around, and finance is on the phone, asking why someone ordered laptops without approval. You are still chasing the first request’s approval.
Approval bottlenecks, paper POs, disconnected spreadsheets, and scattered receipts make it impossible to track what has been ordered, delivered, or received, leaving teams guessing and processes stalled. Worst of all, you do not even know where the money is going until it is spent. This is what procurement can look like in too many mid-sized organizations. At a certain scale, manual procurement cannot keep up and reaches a breaking point.
Systems that provide procurement automation, like Fraxion, give finance and purchasing teams a single source of truth and a policy-driven process that runs itself, so they can focus on decisions instead of detective work.
Procurement automation takes the steps that used to be done manually (requests, approvals, purchase orders, receiving, and invoice processing) and connects them in one digital flow, supported by internal controls. This ensures every purchase is authorized, within budget, and easy to track.
A few misconceptions are worth clearing up:
With procurement automation, you can stop reacting to costs and start controlling them before they happen. We call this proactive spend management.
Smaller organizations may manage with ad hoc processes for a time. Once you hit a certain size, though, the cracks widen. Approvals slow down. People become impatient and bypass the system. Finance loses track of who is buying what. Overspending and risks follow.
Some industry-specific examples:
Purchasing and procurement managers in these industries require a solution that keeps purchasing compliant and fully auditable—without adding extra headcount. Finance leaders are frustrated by discovering overspending only after the fact. Automation bridges that gap, providing real-time visibility and control company-wide.
The Hotchkiss School faced challenges common to mid-sized educational organizations: multiple purchasing methods, limited visibility into spend, and a reliance on manual, paper-based processes. Staff were juggling corporate purchasing cards, check request forms, and email approvals, making it difficult to track purchases or ensure compliance with policy.
Processing purchase orders and approvals was slow and error-prone. Staff spent valuable time chasing signatures, reconciling invoices, and piecing together records, while finance struggled to maintain control and ensure accurate reporting. Transparency and accountability were hard to achieve, leaving both operational teams and leadership frustrated.
By automating procurement with Fraxion, Hotchkiss changed the equation. Requests were routed automatically, approvals happened faster, and every transaction was logged in real time. Staff could easily shop through approved PunchOut catalogs, ensuring purchases aligned with vendor agreements, budgets, and policies. As a result, the school increased purchase order throughput without adding headcount, dramatically reduced administrative overhead, and gained clear, audit-ready reporting for finance and donors alike.
If you’re stuck in spreadsheets and email today, don’t think of automation as a massive overhaul. Start small.
When it works, procurement automation looks like:
For mid-sized organizations needing scalable, efficient processes without the cost and complexity of a full ERP, Fraxion makes procurement automation practical and fast. Minimal training is required and onboarding is fast, so teams start seeing results quickly. Approvals can happen on a mobile app or within tools your staff already use, like Microsoft Teams, keeping workflows seamless and familiar. Finance leaders gain real-time visibility into every purchase, so budget reviews shift from guesswork to confident decision-making, and overspending is prevented before it happens.
If that sounds like the kind of efficiency and control your organization needs, book a Fraxion demo.
AP automation extracts invoice data and speeds up invoice processing after purchases are made. A procurement solution goes further: it starts at the request and approval stage, ensures spending aligns with budgets, and feeds AP with accurate, ready-to-pay data. Procurement automation can extend into AP, reducing errors, speeding processing, and creating a seamless procure-to-pay workflow.
No. ERP modules often cover procurement via add-on modules, but these can be limited in functionality. Purpose-built tools like Fraxion give you full visibility, control, and policy compliance for complete procurement efficiency.
Quick wins usually come from faster approvals, fewer errors, and catching overspending before it happens. Audit prep is faster and supported by accessible records. Finance teams typically see measurable time savings and a 10 - 20% reduction in operational costs.
Not at all. Procurement automation is designed to simplify, speed up workflows, and reduce touchpoints, not add complexity. Teams can start small—automating purchase requests, approvals, and purchase orders—and gradually expand into analytics, custom reporting and integrations as the benefits become clear.
Education, non-profits, healthcare, and agriculture are strong fits because they rely on strict budget controls, field purchasing, multi-fund and multi-location spend management, and clear reporting. But any mid-sized organization that’s outgrown paper POs, email approvals, and scattered spreadsheets will see the benefits.